 Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome back to Madrid, Spain, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering HPE Discover Madrid. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Peter Burris. Vaibhav Parmar is here, he's a partner with PWC. Good to see you again. Good afternoon, thank you for having me here. Yeah, you're welcome. So, PWC obviously, people know it as top consultancy, global capabilities, deep industry expertise, but give us the update on sort of your role and where you're focused. Sure, so I represent our technology consulting organization at PWC and basically we work with our clients and our business partners in bridging the gap between the business solution and the business outcome that are intended and all of the enabling technologies that get to the outcome. And so our role is to design solutions, help implement and get them deployed and make sure they work properly. All with the objective of this technology has to be aligned to the outcome, the business results that are being intended. So we provide that traceability from the beginning to the end and we are the part of the consulting organization that focuses on the use of these new and emerging technologies for bringing that business realization. So anybody who's followed the tech business obviously has been following cloud and the impact that cloud has had on customers, on industry competition, on how companies partner, go to market, et cetera, and achieve outcomes. So hybrid cloud is all the rage. Hybrid IT, what does that mean to you? You hear it from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, what does it mean to PWC? Sure, so I think the word hybrid has become very pervasive now as we think about technology, as we think about IT. And there's several definitions to the word hybrid or the terminology hybrid IT. First, it's the use of multiple types of technology environments to deliver the outcome. It could be a public cloud provided by one of the major cloud providers. It could be all of the on-premise traditional data center technologies and infrastructure. It could be a combination of both using some third-party intermediary in a co-location or in a hosted manner. But that's one part of the hybrid definition. The second part of it is actually being able to access services and capabilities that are built and innovated by the providers. So if you look at where Microsoft is going with Azure and all of the platform as a service capabilities that they've introduced into the marketplace, how do we take advantage of that so that we're not building individual Lego blocks? We're actually taking Lego blocks that have been built and assembling them for some type of a business outcome. So hybrid is also taking advantage of the services that have been pre-built, pre-defined, so that we can fuse them together to get the result that we're looking for. And the third part of hybrid is what we're now starting to take advantage of with the public cloud providers, which is we use what we need and only pay for what we need. In the traditional model, we buy this much and we may be used to using this much at some point in time, this much at some point in time. I think in a new and emerging model, we only want to pay for what we need and what we use, whether it's in a public cloud manner or it's in our own data center manner. So hybrid is also that flexible consumption and economic model associated with all of this technology and the infrastructure. So what's the predominant conversation going on with customers today? Are they saying, Bob, help me get to the public cloud. I don't want to have all this infrastructure in-house or are they saying, look, I can't move everything to the cloud, but I want that cloud experience in my own operations. Hybrid IT obviously is the latter, but what's the dominant discussion with customers? So I think it starts often as the first because customers hear that, hey, everybody's talking about the public cloud, maybe I need to be there. But then very quickly, we come to the conclusion that a public cloud by itself may not be enough or adequate and we actually need to think about the hybrid model for a number of reasons. It could be for data governance and compliance reasons. There are jurisdictions and municipalities that have data residency requirements which make public cloud more difficult to use. It could be for performance reasons where a lot of the applications and the use cases are of a nature that an on-premise environment will continue to make more sense. So very quickly, we move to the point of view that a hybrid model is the more probable and practical model, but the conversation also is not so much that I want to be in the public cloud or I need a hybrid cloud, it's more so around, here's the outcome in the business result that I'm looking to achieve. It could be that I want to get more features out to the market faster. It could be that I want to take advantage of innovation that's available to me so that I don't have to invest in that myself. It could be that my developers are antsy for all of this new technology that's available and they don't want to be encumbered by more traditional life cycle activities. All of that then leads to the decision or the discussion on, okay, well this sounds like a cloud-oriented mindset, let's talk about what is available to us to get more flexibility, to get more agility, to get the developers all the tools that they're looking for. And that's where we quickly start saying, okay, the public cloud has all of these offerings, but again, it may not be adequate enough and we need to complement that with a non-premise environment and the hybrid model becomes a natural landing point. So the technology's a means to that outcome end. Okay, so in thinking about the realities of hybrid cloud, hybrid IT, whatever you want to call it, how do you actually, you've named some attributes and some parameters, how do you actually bring those to the clients, how do you make it real? Sure, so I think we have to think about what is it that we need to make it real? Again, if we think about it from a developer point of view, they want quick access to environment so they can do testing, they can do code reviews, right? And the environment has to be stood up in a very timely manner. Today it takes time to request the environment, to do all of the configurations, make sure all the security processes are in place, but the developers want quick access because they want to turn that code over very quickly. So that's one part of what is needed to make this real, let's think about the developers. The second part of it is around operations. We want this to be safe, we want this to be secure, we want this to be aligned to our corporate policies on regulation, on use, whatever it might be. And so we have to think about, okay, well, what are all of those elements that make this compliant, that make this highly aligned to our security policies? The third part is the economic part of the equation. Again, we want to only pay for what we want to use. How do we make that a reality in an on-premise world where we're used to traditionally spending a lot of money at one time and then we're just amortizing that over time? Well, in this new world, we need that economic model as well, right? The ability to only pay for what we need yet still have the capacity that we're looking for. So when we think about what is needed to make this a reality, I think it's the infrastructure in an on-premise environment has to look and feel very much like the infrastructure that's in the public cloud. Highly accessible, you can turn it on and turn it off when you need it. You can spin up these environments when you need it and then you turn them off when you don't need them. It's the consumption model and the economic model. Again, I'm only going to pay for what I need and not for excess capacity. So that capability has to be there as well. And then the third is the fact that developers are highly motivated by these innovative capabilities that are available in the public cloud model. So, firewall as a service, storage as a service. How do we make that equally available in an on-premise environment? The on-premise world and the cloud world have to look very much alike from an infrastructure point of view, from an application and services point of view, and from an economic and sourcing point of view. That's what's needed to make it a reality. Is the Delta, so that all sounds great and it's consistent with what we see in our research. But then, but when you start to peel the onion on what exactly goes in on-prem, it isn't exactly like the cloud, but maybe it doesn't have to be. Does it just have to be substantially better than what was there before and substantially mimic the cloud? With some other attributes that the cloud can't deliver, for instance, data residency and other locality stuff, maybe governance, maybe not. I mean, that's one you got to really think through. Some of the cloud guys would say, hey, we got great security and great governance, but is it mapped to my edX as an organization? So, there's some nuance there, but I guess my question is, how close do you actually have to get to satisfy the sort of customer demand? How close to that cloud model? So again, I think I would say we can try to match it from a CPU to CPU point of view or from a storage terabytes, petabytes point of view. But again, our observation and our experience in working with our clients is it's not so much at that level, it's more so at the behavior level. Again, if I'm a developer, I don't want to wait two, three weeks for somebody to stand up an environment. I want to be able to stand it up in 30 minutes or an hour because my code is a microcode. It's not a big monolithic waterfall-oriented code anymore. So if I have a microcode that I want to quickly test, I want to be able to have the environment that's quickly accessible, and when I'm done with it, it can go away. So it's those functional attributes that we have to match. How we technically match them, we can go in many different directions. I think one of the things that we're excited about where HPE is going as an example is with Azure Stack. The availability of Azure Stack in collaboration with Microsoft in an on-premise environment looks and feels very much like the public cloud environment with the ability to get the microservices that we're looking for, with the ability to spin up and spin down the environments in the timely manners that we're looking for. Those are the attributes that I think are the, what we see as our clients looking for and behind the scenes how we technologically enable them, it doesn't have to be a like-for-like match. So the exciting thing is we're seeing the evolution take place, we're seeing the availability now, and it's time to start taking advantage of it. So we talk about hybrid cloud, but in many respects we're really talking about multi-cloud. That's really going to be the challenge. So I want to take you back a few years and you build a scenario and you tell me if you think this is where things are going to be. So a number of years ago, we had a lot of mini computer companies with a lot of specialized networks and if you were running a plant, you'd have all these little mini, and you'd say, I want a single network for everything. And they'd say, yeah, bridge my network, gateway my network, all this other stuff, and along came TCPIP and flattened everything. And that drove a lot of the mini computer companies into, I mean, HP survived because they were one of the first ones to address and adopt TCPIP in a big way. So here's the question. We're going to have hybrid cloud, but it's inevitable we're going to have multi-cloud. Because we're going to have SaaS, we're going to have IAAS, we're going to have on-premise, we're going to have Edge, and all these have to share attributes, as you're saying, of the cloud experience. How are companies going to start thinking about flattening all those different cloud options so they are not recreating the legacy of having to manage all this stuff, but adding a transaction cost of having to do that through a contractual arrangement. Where is this going to end up? Sure. So I think there's a couple of ways to think about that. If we think about the cloud model, you mentioned those terms, infrastructure as a service, you have platform as a service, and you have software as a service. I think we're making a lot of progress on the infrastructure as a service layer, becoming more and more flatter, and more and more consistent across the different providers. Consistent across your private cloud providers, consistent across your public cloud providers, and what I mean by that. Give us an example. So an example would be as we look at where technologies like OpenStack and OpenShift are going. You're essentially turning all of this infrastructure into virtual elements, right? I want a computing resource. Whether it's this company's CPU or this company's CPU, it shouldn't matter. I'm looking for storage. Whether it's this company's storage or that company's storage, it shouldn't matter. I just need high-speed storage, which might be flash, or I need more traditional storage because it's all static data, which may be more disk-based storage. We're becoming more and more flatter from that point of view. And behind the scenes, again, it could be a white box, it could be a branded box. It doesn't really matter to us anymore. So we're making good progress at the infrastructure layer. And on top of it, we've got good control mechanisms to be able to access that infrastructure function. Again, through OpenStack-type technologies, right, that provide this control mechanism so you can provision, you can source, and you can manage and operate. As you get to the next level, which is platform as a service, this becomes a little tricky because this is where you're getting into the application layer that's taking advantage of that infrastructure. And here, you do have differences between the cloud providers. One cloud provider may choose to offer a set of platform services that are built one way, whereas somebody else may do it a little bit differently. And so that does require some contemplation, right? Are we going to go down this path or go down this path because getting a firewall function from this provider, it still gives us a firewall function that this provider provides, but it's done a little bit differently. And that may not be always, you may not be able to make it flat, right? Because it's just the nature of how the application layer is being built up. As you move to the software as a service layer, this is purely at the application layer now, right? And there you will always have differences. Software as a service coming from one CRM provider or HR services provider will be different than another one. But what they've done is completely abstracted all of the underlying requirements. You don't need to worry about infrastructure. You don't need to worry about platform. You're purely sourcing the software function. So I think as going back to your question of where will we get to when it comes to flattening all of these things, I think at the infrastructure layer, we will get there because it's happening. At the platform layer, we may not get there because it's the nature of the business and the functions that these providers are developing and making available. And at the software layer, we won't get there because it doesn't make sense, right? We're going to focus on the business outcome and not necessarily the software itself. Well, how about at the governance layer? My last question, at the governance layer across all these multi-clouds, the SaaS, the platform as a service, the infrastructure, can we get to a common governance model? And why is your approach, talk to me as a customer, how can you help me get to that common governance model? Why is that approach better than just sort of doing it on my own or doing it with a cloud provider? Sure, so you bring up a great point that despite the fact that we will have variances in the cloud providers and the cloud capabilities, yeah, we do need some way to properly manage, run, orchestrate, operate, and govern all of these different multi-cloud scenarios that we will be in as a large enterprise. And so governance becomes a key tenet of how do we make this successful? And governance has a number of different definitions behind it. It's the operating model and the policies by which you provide access to the cloud services. So how do we make sure that a developer isn't just clicking a button and spinning up environments without the right controls behind it? Whether it's in this cloud provider or in this cloud provider. So putting in the policies and controls in place is one element of governance. The second part is having a consistent mechanism for connecting into those cloud providers through the right APIs and interfaces so that when somebody says I need additional storage, you're not having to create bespoke processes and technical interfaces between one provider and a different provider. You almost need an abstraction layer that provides all of the transparency in the back end so you can plug to provider A, provider B, but on the front end to the developers, to the architects, it looks like I want more storage, right? And this machine will do all of the translation behind the scenes. So that's the second part of governance. The third part is on the operating model, on the operations itself. How do we make sure that the cloud provider is holding up to their commitments in terms of reliability, availability, right throughput, all of these commitments that they've made so that we can get the performance results that we're looking for? Well, provider A is going to have a different set of mechanisms to run and operate their environment compared to a provider B. So governance also includes this element of looking at all of those different mechanisms by which the environments are being monitored and operated and giving us that consistent view. So we know that, yep, we're getting the services and the performance and the throughput that we're looking for. And we've got a common set of processes and tools that allow us to interface into each of those providers on the back end. So we're not having to do all of this B spoke tools development, we can do it in a common way. And the fourth part to governance is ongoing controls. So how do we make sure that what we're expecting to use, what we're expecting to consume is aligned to the forecast and that we're not deviating. If we are deviating, there's a good rationale behind it, right? If the developers say over the next six to 12 months, I'm expecting to use this much storage and this much compute because it's aligned to these business objectives, how do we make sure that's what ends up happening and that the developers aren't spinning up extra environments without the right discipline behind it. So that's a part of governance as well. Excellent, well great framework, my buff. Thanks very much, we got to leave it there. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing your thoughts. Absolutely, it was my pleasure. Thank you, David, thank you Peter. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, but we'll be back with our next guest. We're live from HPE Discover, Madrid 2017. This is theCUBE.